


of kevlar

by aosc



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-02-22
Packaged: 2018-05-22 07:40:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6070858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aosc/pseuds/aosc
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal Lecter looks at her, for just a moment, as if she is something to be revered. Will looks at the edge where his cheek bone peaks as if it could sprout through his skin in the harsh sunspots, if she just peeled a dull nail over the spot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	of kevlar

* * *

 

Will hears herself be talked of in her vicinity; it should probably be a little disconcerting to be passive about it, but, as with so many other things, she only ever lets it be to her advantage, never another thing at her elbow to be a disadvantage.

 

"Prof. Graham studies pathological insanity for a living, I'm not sure I see where this differentiates from that, Dr. Bloom."

 

Alana's intake of breath is sharper than she means to show, Will is sure. "I'd watch my words very carefully if I were you, Agent Crawford."

 

Jack Crawford is, for all means and intents, an imposing figure. Cut wide, with shoulders thick like slabs, hands calm but circling at his set hips, always wary - always vigilant. Will couldn't see herself there if she tried. Never trigger shy, but itching to peel back the skin of her shoulder, prod at the damaged joint, see to the extent of the damage that is visceral to her own touch. Nothing she can't see in nightmares, of course, but feel actual skin beneath her fingers. Not just the faceless version of the night, the solid walls of their trachea squeezed beneath her fingers, a slip of fashioned steel cutting through skin, blood. Too obsessed with seeing the damage that is a result of walking down this path.

 

Sometimes, she wishes she could just.

 

She would walk in heels if she thought it benefitted her. As it is, she curls a strand of hair behind her ear, and pushes into the vicinity of space where she knows she will be noticed; a scurry of a shadow Alana sees as familiar.

 

Will sees Alana, and a flash of her own fingers, steady at work, peeling skin back from the dense shine bone of her skull, like so many times in her mind before. She sees Jack Crawford, and she sees a predator, who is coming for her to blindside. She knows them too, unfortunately, knows where to bury the knife at the innermost part of a fleshy thigh, or at the base of a collar, turned inward for the artery.

 

Jack Crawford's eyes shine bright, hard, in expectancy. Harsh with the things he's seen, roving her face for anything delicate to break apart, to bend at the seams, she's sure. "Prof. Graham," Jack Crawford says, "It's a pleasure to make your reacquaintance."

 

Will knows the contained pleasure of his tone. She knows _him_ , barely, but for all that he's the best, he's generic. "Agent Crawford," she says, "I'm not sure I could say the same, if you're actively seeking me out."

 

Jack Crawford laughs, flat, polite; always, always contained. Will senses Alana's glower at his half turned back. His hands twitch towards his hip, probably unnoticed, he's so used to how to move around his holster. Will knows that jump of fingers; she doesn't have the iron in her wrists, or the roughness of shoulder, but she could twist the gun, aim for an artery she's exploring so many times a night the sheets are barely damp with panic anymore. She wishes that it didn't all appear so bland to her. That she'd look at herself and see anything but barely contained - but still contained - panic. Lurking, breaking for the surface of the dam. She wishes that she would feel less like this is a chapter explored already, that he's seeking her out - asking her advice. That she hasn't already foreseen how it will affect her.

 

"I'd very much like for you to look at something for me, Professor," Jack Crawford says, and Will sees the end of the line already before her.

 

*

 

Will writhes out of sleep, feeling along the ridge of the twisted mattress on her left hand side for a gun, a cut from a knife - a dead body. Always, if everything else scurries her, a dead body. Its literal dead weight anchoring her down, knowing that if it's there, lying shock still beside her, she's not dreaming it up; she's snapped. Even she can take comfort in the cold reality laying dormant in a maybe-future.

 

No, she knows that she's not dreaming because she's not straddling a fighting waist, elbows expertly drawn in towards her body, working deep into the hollow of someone she knows' throat.

 

She rubs at her eyelids, lined with sleep, with the balls of her palms, half hesitating because she doesn't want to get blood in her eyes, before realizing that it's not - never, actually - there. She's still shaking, but detached, she knows this. She's known it since before she stepped into Quantico, half expecting to be detained, not signed in at the counter, spotted Italian marble floors and a new, shiny visitor's badge clipped to the strap she hangs from her neck.

 

She scrubs at her chest, a sheen of sweat at her collar. In the dip of the moon, she sees the outlines of a stag lumbering out of sight.

 

*

 

Hannibal Lecter looks at her, for just a moment, as if she is something to be revered. Will looks at the edge where his cheek bone peaks as if it could sprout through his skin in the cold sun light, if she just peeled a dull nail over the spot. She quickly reverts her gaze.

 

"Hannibal Lecter," he says, lips blunt on the vowels of his name, his English greeting smooth, but his accent grating, like stone whetting on stone. Will nods, sharp, to where his adam's apple jumps. "Graham, Professor Graham," she says, as though she's swallowed razors, jaw grinding down on fine sand. There is no man she gives the pleasure - and power, of her name, unless explicitly told to do so.

 

Hannibal Lecter smiles pleasantly; it's not a smile she knows. She sees the genuine pleasure in the tug of his lips, but they peel back slightly over his teeth, providing his face with a set sort of edge. Features carved from stone, smooth, smooth, its lines and history untraceable once removed from its origins. Will knows men; their desires, their thickly cut figures, eager to crowd her spaces, fill in her blanks.

 

She does not know Hannibal Lecter.

 

*

 

She knows she is damaged beyond extent not entirely because fishing with lure and taking apart the old 1987 Waverunner she'd bought at a scrapyard in '08 to take with her to Virginia, break open its hull to pick at its insides, blackened and unusable now with rust and decay, is what she does to calm herself down when she wakes screaming at 04:18, the night to Wednesday morning. But mostly. She pulls on a pair of academy branded sweats and tugs a tank top over her bare chest, stepping into her float suit and boots, thick rubber scratched and creaking, and goes out into the crack of bright dawn with her lures and rod.

 

The creek is eerily silent, but the water is running, always running, and the stream is soothing to step into.

 

She doesn't catch anything she doesn't immediately let go again, but the tug and pull of the line, the spasm of the lure in the break of the current, it stills the restlessness in her head, if just for a while.

 

The Waverunner's old generator is _fucked_ , she thinks with a little dismay, but dives in, greased from wrist to elbow already, and screws on a few recently purchased bolts, making sure they're steady; changes both the bolts and the washer plates. She frowns down on the rotor assembly, but knows that the reseller closest to Virginia doesn't sell them as old as '87 anymore.

 

Both the lures and the engine grease reminds her with pangs, real, tangible snaps on her heart, of dad. But Will knows she's damaged, ad finitum. The nightmares, the daydreams, of tearing someone's - anyone's - throat out, are telling.

 

*

 

Will lets Winston out in the dewy morning and expects the rush of cold air to encase her to the point of her skin prickling in discomfort, but is instead met with Hannibal Lecter with one arm crooked, knuckles tight just on the space where her door had been. The dog slinks just past his woolen slacks, space tight enough to brush, but he doesn't seem to mind as much as Will would have expected him to.

 

"Doctor Lecter," Will says, rough from sleep, off edge from dreaming of waking up with a stag's horns driven through the base of her thoracic spine, systematically climbing upwards until she is pinned up by the entire curve of her back, from tailbone to knobbed end where her neck incepts.

 

"Miss Graham," Hannibal says, and smiles, a little disarmingly. He holds up an indistinct paper bag in his other hand, "May I come in?"

 

She makes him coffee strong enough to not need any additional whisky. He doesn't complain. "May I use your first name?" he asks, instead.

 

There is no man she gives the pleasure - and power, of her name, unless explicitly told to do so. But she has a hard time singling him out as a man, and not as a curious case of extraterrestrial creature, not quite on the same wavelength as the rest of them lowly mortals Will counts herself in the midst of.

 

"Will," she allows, after a stretch of silence that gets too clammy. She refills her cup. "It's Will."

 

Hannibal nods. "Will it is," he says. "Very Irish, _Will Graham_ ; do you know of any roots?"

 

Will is as much Irish as any other third to fourth generation immigrant child, she supposes. She inclines her head. "A grandfather was, I think. What about Hannibal Lecter? Hardly the American dream, Doctor."

 

He delicately chews the contents he'd pierced on his fork, but watches her, always. Will detects the spring onion and a hint of turmeric in the eggs, and shovels more into her mouth. Beggars can't be choosers, and retching into the basin after imagining herself strung up, watching herself be strung up, will eventually upset your stomach to the extent of accepting a stranger who's looking at you like _that_ , over the threshold just because he brings you food that is of basically unknown origins, and seems to have taken a morbid sort of interest in picking her brain apart ever so gently.

 

" _Lecter_ is of Lithuania," he says once he's finished chewing, "I imagine my mother spun a different tale with _Hannibal_. Actively choosing not to give me a family name for the sake of her own amusement."

 

Will has no real concept of what that means, but the sharp glint of teeth as his lip curls is at once humorous, and hinting savagely. It's an edge she's familiar with, the sharpness of the blade, the teetering edge of a fever; curling your hand around someone's wrist, resisting the urge to snap it simply to watch the bones give way beneath the skin. She knows this edge, intimately.

 

" _Wilhelmina_ is German," Will offers. It's what he'll get. He appears content, though.

 

*

 

"Where do you land on the spectrum?" Jack Crawford asks, a little slipping from his tight, tight control.

 

Will worries her glasses on the bridge of her nose. Stares ahead, picking apart the seams of Jack's fishbone stitched suit jacket, the white shirt beneath; the taught skin at its innermost, binding muscle and tissue and capillaries. Life. She breathes through her teeth. "I'm fine, Jack," Will intones.

 

She hears, partially sees, the clench of his fist resting on the armrest. _Good_ , she thinks. It's not what she feels, but it's _good_ , to see him crackle, bend to her for just a little while. Incline to her barely in place control.

 

"You're fine?" Jack bites out. "I wouldn't be, Will, so how are you _supposedly_ _fine_?"

 

Will allows herself one look. A flit of her gaze, passing his, dark, a frown drawing his brow tight. She could almost smile at what he's saying. "It's a good thing you're not me then, Jack," she says, and says it like a promise, because it's a good thing she's her, and no one else is.

 

*

 

Garret Jacob Hobbs stares back at her, from where she's bent down on her knees at his shoulder. The flimse of white and death over his eyes flit, and creases crowd the corners as he grins. Toothless, barren. But she's not scared. Here, she exercises control. Here, she has a knife, and an inkling of where to cut to not soil herself too much. She starts at the sternum, expanses of white, bloodless skin covering up the damaged ribs.

 

She cuts. And cuts. Here, she's precise. Here, she doesn't need eight shots to do it. To satisfy the well of pure, ink black anger.

 

*

 

Hannibal invites her over for dinner.

 

It's not a spectacle, but Will recognizes the cut of his suit as vintage Yves Saint Laurent, and she's wearing Alana's wardrobe. Red, narrow, weaponized. This is not a battle she's coming for, but she likes to prepare herself for the fights she can prepare for - they're not many.

 

"Will," Hannibal smiles, and eases the door inwards for her. "Please, come in."

 

She doesn't normally indulge in meat, but eats, his fine cutlery silver, bone china plates, red wine swelling in her mouth. Berries and chocolate and a slow, slow aging process in the murk of a wine cellar getting to her tongue. She doesn't make a habit of drinking, either, and it gets to her head far too easily. Will has to remind herself of not fighting to keep it out; she's not immediately unsafe here. Or so she tells herself, so Hannibal tells her.

 

" _Queen Wilhelmina,_ " he says, lips quirking, as though he's indulging in a private joke they share that she's not been privy to yet.

 

"Of the Netherlands," Will finishes, unwilling to be lured to the bait. She raises an eyebrow, and finishes the last chips of roasted Jerusalem artichoke spread thin over her plate. "There's nothing charming left there, Doctor."

 

Hannibal hums. "I'd hardly expect so. Analyzing people for a living often leaves us unwilling to socialize with the vast, ordinary _,_ majority - flattery, or no. It has a tendency to make us all the more alone. And give us all the more reason to seek out the people we come to accept."

 

"You don't consider this ordinary?" Will pierces a pitted cherry, still feeling the wine in her throat, the cherry complementing its taste. She has to admit to Hannibal's fine palate; it's not crashing and burning, as far as work dates go.

 

"I've never considered you ordinary, Will. Please take that as a compliment."

 

The light in the room is glowing with embers flaking from the fire, warm and melting. Will sees something reflect raw on Hannibal's face that she otherwise only sees flitter by; a hunger, but hard. Not the loose base of desire in it, arousal. It's a crack in his mask, chipping, peeling. It's hard and rough, not like the steel bow of his lips, or the starch cut of his jaw. Hannibal looks at her as though he wants to examine the workings of her brain from the inside crack of her frontal lobe.

 

Will shivers, but chalks it up to the wide panorama of glass behind her, reflecting the fire out onto the thin sheaf of snow outside.

 

*

 

She doesn't often dream of being victimized.

 

She's laid bare, detachedly watching as her ribs are spread open; cracked up to reveal the purple beatings of her lungs sucking for air, the dark heart pumping a frenzy of blood around. She can't see a face, but she knows the hands she can glimpse, bare, long hands in the headlights shine, as they work deeper into Will. It's a dream, so she can't breathe, but doesn't take issue with it. It's just happening.

 

She wakes up, but when she reaches out towards her left - the habit -  her fingers find cold skin and spindly cracks in it, reaching into wide bullet holes. Garret Jacob Hobbs smiles wordlessly when she twists her face to see.

 

She wakes up a second time, panting, sweaty, sheets spilling over the edge of the bed and tangling in her feet.

 

Buster is whining at the door, along with Spikes and a couple of the others. She takes deep, deep gulps of air before she considers crossing the distance, knowing that she's seen those hands in someone's belly before, white light of an ambulance's interior coming back to her.

 

*

 

Will screws the final bolt into the first hull deck, wrestling its large, hooded shape over her knee to be able to get a more critical eye on the fine spiderweb cracks in the engine hood comp, biting her lower lip and tracing one that could become an issue, if she ever puts it in the water.

 

She startles when the dogs start barkin in unison, and there's the soft press of wet grass giving way for heeled brogues outside. She carefully maneuvers out from underneath the hull deck and stands up. She's careful about not stepping too far away from her toolbox until the dogs quieten, and there's only Winston's low whine and their wagging tongues and tails at someone they know. They round the corner with Dr. Lecter in tow, looking more at home than Will would give him credit for, attentively leading them forward. She relaxes slightly, and tugs her gloves off.

 

Hannibal stops in the inception of the garage, casting long shadows in the mouth of daylight. "I did not mean to disrupt your work," he says.

 

Will shakes her head. His suit is navy and camel, she thinks the Italian word for it is _cammello_ , having kept Dr. Lecter's company for some time now, but he looks as at home in her filthy, corroding surroundings as he does in his polished office. Adaptable, a chameleon in his own right. She could say she's impressed, but she's just dreamt of him bending the stair of her ribs open, so, if she'll be excused. "No, it's fine. Not much more I can do about this anyway."

 

"Your father - he did this?"

 

"Yeah," Will says, and leans after the disinfectant towels at the end of the small worktable. "And the fishing, and the hermit thing - the dogs are mine, though."

 

Hannibal cocks his head slightly. "We're prone to mirroring our heritage, many of us shadowed by the expectations of our parentage."

 

Will laughs, a short, ugly thing shaking her shoulders and rumbling through her throat. "I can't imagine my dad ever having expectations, not as far as the next day," she says. She wipes her hands down. "This is some Dr. Phil psychoanalyzing of you, Doctor. Rather unbecoming, actually."

 

Hannibal smiles. "Lunch?" he asks, not rising to the poorly presented challenge.

 

Will nods, tucks her barbed words aside. "Let me get cleaned up," she says.

 

"That was already a prerequisite, if you wouldn't mind," Hannibal says.

 

"I think I can manage," Will says, and doesn't actively imagine his hands splaying over her ribcage, feeling out its density, cross marking where he'll cut into her. Around the far corner of her house, something dark disappears, its hooves having left wide tramples in the wet ground.

 

*

 

"I imagine Jack sees you as his finest china, to be used only for special guests," Hannibal says, and studies Will from across her ratty dinner table. Will wants to choke on the piece of chorizo she's chewing.

 

"I am _Jack's complete lack of surprise_ ," she quotes, not half sarcastic, and finishes her glass of water. Mint and lemon, of course he'd bring that as well. A laugh brews in her throat. Uglier, blacker, than before.

 

"I'm not sure he truly sees you for what you are, Will," Hannibal says.

 

Will studies the fall of silver and dark hair across his forehead. The fine line of his eyebrow, slanting over his eyes, warm and brown and harsh as a barbed wire. She runs with the thought, sees the barbed wire enclose Hannibal's wrists, bite through thin, fine skin; she's not entirely sure he sees her for what she is, either. Something other than Jack's Fine China, sure, but not the truth.

 

"Do you, Dr. Lecter?" Will says.

 

This time, Hannibal smiles, and it's a little less contained. She sees it again, the hard, fine line between what he pretends to be, and what he wants to be. Not to the world, perhaps, but she thinks it's what he wants to be to her.

 

"If you would permit it," Hannibal says, "Now, finish your food, please."

 

*

 

Jack slams his palm into the table, rattling honorary silvers and leveling manila folders, spilling over with paper. He glowers at Will, who simply looks back, head swimming with white and black stars of a particular case of migraine. She can't quite look anywhere, the fluorescent making it worse, nausea already working in her throat.

 

"You're not supposed to get too _close_ , Graham," he spits, like it's all of her fault and none of his. Will wishes she could grit her teeth and smile.

 

"Hannibal could tell you I'm not," she suggests, a half whisper, her tongue sluggish from the two Sumatriptan she'd taken dry half an hour earlier. She should lie down. She also shouldn't get too close - and she isn't. Expect for when she sees the stag standing over her, the curl of her frame naked before the cold night, leaves and mud and grass beneath her. The stag breathes, breath condensing, a white cloud above her. From its flanks, raven's wings sprout. Its horns are perennially dark with blood, spearing across to overlap with the other side.

 

She doesn't anymore see Abigail bleeding out before her. She thinks it might be because she's distanced herself, if only for a little bit.

 

"You can't save lives from beyond the grave," Jack says, grim, but sinking down and into the chair in the face of her pale, wide eyed pain. Will lets out a shuddering breath. Her own, measly life was never supposed to be accounted for in this equation.

 

*

 

_I'm not supposed to get too close_ , Will thinks, in the midst of a starburst headache, blinding, splitting, cracking down her spine and pulling the nerves loose like threads unravelling. She hears the sound a short gallop, and the purling of a creek, rushing, and the zip of distance pulling past her quickly.

 

"Will," she hears, gently, and feels the press of finger pads along her cheek.

 

She wakes up through a haze, and searches for five punctures of bullet wounds in a body gone cold from decay at her side. But it isn't cold, where her hand touches - where she reaches, something breathes, softly buffing at her stretched out palm. Its muzzle is silken, and Will doesn't have to turn to know that the stag will be gone when she looks.

 

*

 

She wakes to the crackling of a fire, and a linen bedspread covering most of her body, where she hasn't kicked it off of her. She's clothed, but out of jacket, boots, scarf. The table before her is ratty cherry, low and close enough to touch, close enough that she recognizes as her late grandmother's. Artfully spread across it is water, her prescription Sumatriptan, and a large bound bouquet of Daytona tulip, eucalyptus leaves and great sallow. She stretches out for the twigs, revers at the sallow's flowers, soft and steel beneath her fingertips.

 

She half expects him to still be there, harsh and jaded gaze calmly on her as he tucks her away in the couch, contradicting. Will wishes she could get close enough to scrape her nails beneath his exterior, catch on the edge that is sometimes a flash of set teeth, too animalistic for Hannibal to truly be all human skin and bones, and not just the flesh of something otherworldly. She is about to get too close, can feel its added weight, a deep, deep knowledge settle in her marrow.

 

*

 

"What did you feel when you pulled the trigger, Will?" Hannibal asks.

 

Garret Jacob Hobbs is at her elbow, sitting in the day bed, knees wide, face smiling. Will duly ignores him, but can't ignore the sick pulse of something warm in her sternum. She swallows around it, and says "Like I would need ten more shots before I could stop."  _I am Jack's Smirking Revenge_ , she thinks.

 

Hannibal barely smiles at her. Something chips in his mask, something raw and revealed whenever she shares something of this magnitude. Will amends her thought.

 

_I Am_ Will's _Smirking Revenge_. She is entirely her own violence.

 

*

 

Alana looks up from where she's crouched next to Applesauce's lowered head, muzzle shoved into her bare palm. She considers Will in the pivots of sunlight spearing through the crowns overhead.

 

"How are you, Will?" she says.

 

Will pulls her coat tighter around her, and whistles for the dogs, somewhere in the vicinity, kicking up powdered snow and dirt after a rabbit's old trail.

 

"I'm fine," Will says.

 

Somewhere, there are girls who have been abducted, because they bore similarity to a mad man's outbound daughter. The daughter has a warped scar slashed across her neck for the trouble. Will still has her blood on her hands. Knows the pulse of Abigail's half severed throat beneath her hands; the flutter of skin ripping, blood gushing, lungs too desperate to constrict around air.

 

Sometimes, she feels this beneath her palms, and scrubs them raw of blood that is never there. Is afraid to wipe her eyes from tears and salt because of this. She is not the result of this. She has promised herself - she is not the result of violence and sociopaths. She is her own violence. She is her own -

 

Some nights, she wakes up and she knows that Hannibal Lecter has bright, bright eyes and hands that never shake at the wrist because he is so used to having them deep in people's bowels, crowded with the cardia and the aorta, the esophagus and to the far right, the dark spleen. That he had looked up at her from where he's operating on a patient with little to zero room for error, dark, dark eyes there. And Will thinks, now, when she should have thought so then -  _oh_ , with a pang, and a realization.

 

Hannibal Lecter often looks at her like she is something to be revered. Like her inconclusive jumps are treasures he collects for himself, pleasure in plucking her thoughts.

 

Will is beginning to suspect that she is the heart he's massaging to get it back to pumping, fingers buried deep in her breast whilst she's still awake, waiting for it to kickstart before he rips it out for her, severs its main artery whilst she watches. His long wrists never, ever shake.

 

"I'm fine," she promises, without being able to uphold it. Because at the next turn of day, she sees herself backing Alana up against a far off pine, snapping splinters of the horns that slowly begins to crowd the crown of her head, to keep for herself.

 

She knows about men, and their desires. And this is all about collecting treasures.

 

*

 

Will isn't quite sure how she ends up in Hannibal's waiting room. Just that he opens in an oxblood suit with its starch cut of white shirt beneath, divided by a blue with red-checkered silk tie.

 

"Will," he says, and then, "We haven't scheduled tonight."

 

Will takes a look at the clock on the wall, the cuckoo one that rings forebodingly, which tips a little askew on the mint wallpaper. She thinks of her lures, of the quiet of the stream. Of how she feels, pointing her the muzzle of her gun at someone who _deserves_ it.

 

"Oh," she says.

 

She traces his face, his chest, with her gaze. She's forgotten her glasses - somewhere, from wherever she came. Hannibal's tie is a perfected waterfall from the double windsor, and the blues in it bring out the magentas in the suit jacket. Oxblood. Rich blood, her tongue swelling in her mouth.

 

"You look a little pale," Hannibal says, "Please - come in. I'll be a little while, and then I can take you home."

 

He allows her in through the door like he always does, always the host, shuttering it gently behind her. Will slowly walks towards the patient's chair, unspoken, but always the one with its back turned vulnerably towards the doorway. Hannibal's, situated with its back to his desk. A wall of solid oak at his shoulder.

 

"I don't - " Will begins, throat like sandpaper, head tipping off of her shoulders with the force of what crashes through it. She imagines skin slipping like a paper glove from an arm, outstretched, reaching for her. Angels with their wings peeled. Abigail's throat opening up between her fingers like there is nothing she can do to stop that ugly mouth from grinning up at her.

 

He's dimmed the lights, or her vision is clouded - she can't be sure. But Will stumbles into sitting, her legs giving in when her knees hit the padding of the chair behind her. She's backed into it, eyes on the pale upturns of Hannibal's palms. He is walking towards a wounded animal, crowding it into the space where he can shut it in. Will shudders, and Hannibal sinks to his knees before her.

 

"How are you feeling, Will?" he asks, a note of a rumbling storm in his throat, unusually off, for him. She's known for some time now that he feigns concern the best.

 

Will manages a smile, "I'm fine, aren't I - Doctor?"

 

Hannibal looks at her, says nothing. She reaches out, and he lets her slip her fingers through his hair, swivel his head ever so slightly. Forwards, tipping left, up, up - tilt your chin until it's perfectly there, light bouncing on the bridge of his nose, jaw vulnerable before her. Hannibal looks at her with dark, dark eyes. She could scoop them out to keep them, bejeweled in their knowledge.

 

Will looks at Hannibal, as the horns of the black stag he has mounted by the door sprouts, spikes, through his skull.

 

"Oh," she says.

 

"Have I helped you see, my dear Will?" Hannibal murmurs, and snaps up to catch her fingers in a loose cage of his own. His for the taking.

 

Will sees the end of the line, getting close, towed towards the shoreline. She smiles, letting the ugly, black humor of it through. She often thinks, if she could just, then she wouldn't wake up to look for a gun, a knife - Garret Jacob Hobbs' bloodless corpse.

 

"I see," she whispers, and squeezes the fine, fine bones of Hannibal's fingers, hoping that she can muster up the strength needed to splint, to snap them. This is a product of what he wants, she thinks, and feels her Glock at the dip between her spine and her tailbone, the only thing crystalline in her muddled mind - this is the product, not the result.

 

She thinks that she does not have the iron in her wrists, nor the roughness of shoulder, but she could twist the gun just so.

 

*

 

**Author's Note:**

> fem!will is fiercer than her male counterpart, is what i'm thinking. this is a little dream-esque, not quite linear, not quite how the first season goes. comment and critic ever appreciated.


End file.
